Former Bush aide Andy Card says Barack Obama should be more formally clad in Oval Office

But Obama isn't the first to drop the suit coat while at work

February 09, 2009|By Mark Silva, Washington Bureau

The clucking could be heard clear across the capital when President Barack Obama first showed up in the Oval Office without a suit coat.

"There should be a dress code of respect," Andy Card, a chief of staff to former President George W. Bush, declared last week. "I wish that [Obama] would wear a suit coat and tie."

It's a matter of propriety and the dignity of the office, Card maintained.

"The Oval Office symbolizes ... the Constitution, the hopes and dreams and, I'm going to say, democracy," Card said. "And when you have a dress code in the Supreme Court and a dress code on the floor of the Senate, floor of the House, I think it's appropriate to have an expectation that there will be a dress code that respects the office of the president."

They had taken that dress code pretty seriously under "43," a longtime aide and former counselor to Bush told The New York Times.

"I'll never forget going to work on a Saturday morning, getting called down to the Oval Office because there was something [Bush] was mad about," ex-counselor Dan Bartlett told the newspaper. "I had on khakis and a buttoned-down shirt, and I had to stand by the door and get chewed out for about 15 minutes. He wouldn't even let me cross the threshold."

It turns out, however, that the online Huffington Post has broken the code: unearthing a photograph taken of President Bush, the day after his first inauguration, wearing shirt-sleeves in the Oval (top right).

He was meeting with Harriet Miers, his friend and counsel whom he would later nominate, without success, for the Supreme Court, the one with the dress code.

It turns out, also, that the archives hold a virtual gallery of photos of presidents sans suit coat in the Oval Office: Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter among them.

The casual tone of the Obama team goes only so far, however. Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, has allowed that the boss has caught him with his feet up on his desk in the West Wing.